Line spacing and width analyzed

May 20th, 2006

Microsoft Font Blog assembled some statistical data on reading speed at various amounts of leading (line spacing) and measure (line width). Will Robertson went one step further and made a visual interpretation of those numbers with actual examples in a PDF document and ranked then according to reading speed.

Apparently the optimum combination of measure and leading (at 10pt text size) are 8,1cm and 12pt respectively, followed by 5,8cm & 12pt and 5,8cm and 11pt in third place.

The most significant thing here though, is that the additional 2pt leading performed best regardless of the measure.

In case you still don’t get it:

.text
{ line-height: 1.2em }